Ubuntu wants to get as many touchscreens working as possible for Karmic Koala. The developers are asking for help by collecting vendor and product IDs for USB touchscreens out in the market.

"Do you have a touchscreen that isn't working in Ubuntu? We need your help!" is Amit Kucheria's opening words in his blog. His initiative is to collect hardware information on touchscreens for Ubuntu's 9.10 release by requesting submissions to Bug #317094.

The USB touchscreens may be recognized by the kernel's usbtouchscreen module, but their IDs are not yet on the list of supported devices.

To investigate the device ID, first use lsusb to get the vendor and product ID, then use sudo to load the usbtouchscreen module and sysfs to add the ID to it. Finally, write the ID to the /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usbtouchscreen/new_id file. For example, with a 1473:0158 device ID: